The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Posted: 28 Oct 2011 07:12 PM PDT 18 Minutes: Find your focus, master distraction and get the right things done Author: Peter Bregman Publisher: Business Plus This is a collection of the author's column in Harvard Business Review. Peter Bregman shows how busy people can cut through all the daily clutter and distractions and find a way to focus on key items that are truly the top priorities in our lives. He works from the premise that the best way to combat constant and distracting interruptions is to create productive distractions of one's own. He mixes first-person insights with case studies, and provides pathways that help guide readers – in 18 minutes or less. An Idea a Day: 365 great business ideas for each day of the year Publisher: Marshall Cavendish Business A simple but potentially powerful book for anyone seeking inspiration on a daily basis in the challenging and difficult world of business. The ideas are extracted from the world's best companies and managers. From marketing to public relations, presentations to time management, sales to writing that great copy, each idea is described and is followed by advice on how it can be applied to the reader's own business situation. Business Reports for Busy People Author: Greg Holden Publisher: Advantage Quest This is a wide-ranging guide offering a wide range of samples and templates that can be customised to produce professional-looking, clear and concise reports for virtually any need. Some of these include progress reports, time accounting reports, business plans, feasibility studies, expense reports and statistical samplings. Helping entrepreneurs communicate with numbers has been a focus for Greg Holden since he founded his own business in 1993. Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
| Entertaining take on financial issues Posted: 28 Oct 2011 07:11 PM PDT Michael Lewis takes you on a 'financial-disaster tourism', visiting nations like Iceland, Greece and Ireland. Title: Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour It is sometimes far harder to review a book you like than one you feel indifferent or ambivalent about. A good book is one that offers unique insight; that piques your interest in topics outside of your periphery. A good book, like Michael Lewis' Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour, is one that you want to share to others. Lewis has been having a bit of a bull run in recent times. His last outing, The Big Short, was touted by the Guardian as "Magnificent ... a perfect storm of brilliant writer meeting a big subject." It also received rave reviews from the likes of The Economist, the Financial Times, the Times, the Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Evening Standard, among others. Films based on his previous books, like Moneyball and The Blind Side have brought Lewis wider success. Liar's Poker, based on his short-lived Wall Street career as a Salomon Brothers trader in the 80s, may finally start shooting at the studios. There are also a couple of television series in the works. In Boomerang, Lewis embarks on a bout of "financial-disaster tourism"; visiting nations like Iceland, Greece and Ireland that have, unfortunately, been in the news for all the wrong reasons. Once you have invested in the first chapter, you recognise that there is no better guide than Lewis on this "Meltdown Tour." He is, at once, a wily interviewer and witty writer – possessing rare gifts that enable him to effortlessly enlighten the uninitiated on statistics and markets; unearth some truly fascinating stories of our financial times; and help us see the funny side of human folly. Reading more like an entertaining travelogue than a financial chronicle, Boomerang begins with the story of Kyle Bass, a Texas hedge fund manager who is buying guns and gold bricks. Bass was one of the investors interviewed by Lewis when he was working on The Big Short – one of a handful who had made their fortunes from the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. Bass had consequently predicted that the financial crisis was not over but "was simply being smothered by the full faith and credit of rich Western governments." Bass and his colleagues had a shiny new investment thesis that foreshadowed the collapse of whole countries. They rationalised that since 2002, there had been a false boom in much of the rich, developed world as what appeared to be economic growth was activity fueled by people borrowing money they probably could not afford to repay. Accumulation of debt By their rough count, worldwide debts – public and private – had more than doubled since 2002; from US$84 trillion to US$195 trillion. Bass comments: "We've never had this accumulation of debt in world history." Moreover, the big banks that had extended much of this credit (albeit rather recklessly) were no longer treated as private enterprises but as extensions of their local governments, sure to be bailed out in a crisis. Their new investment thesis noted that the subprime mortgage was more symptom than cause. The deeper social and economic problems that gave rise to it remained. They noted that "the moment investors woke up to this reality, they would cease to think of big Western governments as essentially risk-free and demand higher rates of interest to lend to them." With rising interest rates on their borrowings, these governments would plunge further into debt, leading to further rises in the interest rates they were charged to borrow. In a few especially alarming cases – Greece, Ireland, Japan – it would not take much of a rise in interest rates for budgets to be consumed entirely by interest payments on debt. The moment financial markets realised this, investor sentiment would shift. The moment investor sentiments shifted, these governments would default. Lewis points out that "the financial crisis of 2008 was suspended only because investors believed that governments could borrow whatever they needed to rescue their banks." However, he asks, "What happened when governments themselves ceased to be credible?" Lewis shared that Boomerang began quite accidently, as what started as disbelief in Bass' initial views that developed countries could default, soon morphed into a deep curiousity about Bass' powers of prediction as the financial world began to change; very much in the manner Kyle Bass imagined it might. Entire countries started to go bust. A question nagged at Lewis: How did a hedge fund manager in Dallas even think to imagine these strange events? Two-and-a-half years later after his initial interview with Bass, in the summer of 2011, Lewis discovers the answer: Kyle Bass had played the board game Risk as a kid. Bass shared that "I love playing Risk. And I would always put all of my armies on Iceland, because you could attack anyone from there." The belief that he could attack anyone from Iceland had led Bass to learn whatever he could about Iceland, and to pay special attention when something happened to Iceland. It turned out that Iceland was a good place to start. Post the prologue, what Lewis ends up uncovering in his subsequent chapters on Iceland (Wall Street on the Tundra), Greece (And They Invented Math), Ireland (Ireland's Original Sin), Germany (The Secret Lives of Germans) and California (Too Fat to Fly) may not necessarily be the main stories, but are invariably, the most interesting stories. The stories, reading like the best kind of fiction, are peppered with colourful characters, amusing anecdotes; and sometimes quite shocking and rather strange insights. In cataloguing the case studies in each mentioned country, Lewis seeks to attribute the differing causes of economic chaos and their outcomes to each country's distinctive national characteristics. He asks what each country would do when confronted in a "dark room filled with money." He points out why Icelanders with a culture steeped in macho risk-taking, walking off their fishing trawlers and straight into making million-dollar currency bets, was a disaster waiting to happen. Through Lewis, we vicariously visit a Greek monastery run by money-savvy monks that managed to persuade the government to parlay a worthless lake into a billion-dollar property empire – resulting in a national scandal of sorts, no less. We also see how feuding Greeks who distrust one another in a nation built on nepotism and graft; recklessly avoid tax payment and collection. We witness how the Irish, as a nation beset by a history of oppression and exploitation where landowning was the ultimate escape from the past, built more shiny new homes than there would ever be people. In the final chapter, Lewis looks closer to home to California, used as a starting point to highlight the extent to which America's national debts are now eclipsed by those of its states and cities; where the amounts owed to public-sector workers across the country are larger than it will be ever be able to pay. His almost surreal chat over a bicycle ride with ex-California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger reveals a political system seemingly designed to frustrate sensible, apolitical attempts to fix things and unsustainable behaviour all around, where, as Bloomberg News puts it, "parasites are killing their hosts." Want to travel from your armchair to the New Third World? Buy this book today. Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
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